Sophrony Kirilov pulls hard on the strings of the heavy Russian bells from inside the world’s southernmost Eastern Orthodox church, calling to Mass anybody wanting to pray on this remote Antarctic island. The 38-year-old Russian priest is clad in a loose black robe and a vest dotted with patches of penguins and seals, marking his four years of service […]
Read more
“Knowing what a chicken looks like and what all the chickens before it looked like doesn’t help us to understand the egg,” says Taras Gerya. The ETH Professor of Geophysics uses this metaphor to address plate tectonics and the early history of the Earth. The Earth’s lithosphere is divided into several plates that are in constant motion, and today’s geologists […]
Read more
Climate change may have helped to alter the course of history. A period of extreme and unprecedented cooling in the northern hemisphere 1,500 years ago may have reduced the eastern Roman empire, set the stage for a famine and a devastating pandemic that killed millions, and favored the rise of the Islamic forces that created the Arab empire. The so-called Little […]
Read more
Sea ice is formed from ocean water that freezes. Because the oceans consist of saltwater, this occurs at about minus 1.8 degrees Celsius (28.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Most Antarctic sea ice occurs annually, meaning it forms in the winter and melts during the summer. Sea ice regulates exchanges of heat, moisture and salinity in the polar oceans. It insulates the relatively warm […]
Read more
Astrobiologists searching the heavens for extraterrestrial life have a simple motto: “Follow the water, ”says The Washington Post. Water is an essential ingredient in all earthly biochemistry, so scientists believe it’s logical to look for life first on planets and moons with liquid water.New data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft indicate that Enceladus, a tiny, ice-encrusted moon orbiting Saturn, may be […]
Read more
Millions of years ago Antarctica was not where it is located today. It started off in the mid-latitudes and started moving about an inch to two inches a year to the bottom of the earth. The continent also had palms and baobab trees and reptiles and marsupials. The mountains, valleys and inlets are still located on the continent. Antarctica measures […]
Read more
In forests worldwide, drought consistently has had a more detrimental impact on the growth and survival of larger trees, new research shows. In addition, while the death of small trees may affect the dominance of trees in a landscape, the death of large trees has a far worse impact on the ecosystem and climate’s health, especially due to the important […]
Read more
Chikungunya is a serious health threat. Mosquitoes once limited to tropical I regions are spreading north to the U.S., carrying both dengue fever and Chikungunya, a virus that causes fever, chills, headache, and punishing joint pain that can persist for years. Once a relatively obscure illness limited mostly to Africa, Chikungunya (pronounced chicken gunya) has transformed over the past decade […]
Read more
At least half of the world’s killer whales will become extinct because of toxic waste in the oceans within the next century according to researchers. Some areas despite efforts to control the pollutants of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) still remain at high levels. Research scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) are saying that if we don’t bring down the […]
Read more
European researchers have once again warned that the thinning of the Antarctic ice shelf means that the flow of glaciers on the frozen continent could accelerate, with a consequent rise in sea levels. They examine, in two separate studies, the increasingly precarious state of some of the ice shelf. When the shelf, consisting of ice floating on the ocean, melts, […]
Read more